Conscience of Cicero was fearless, relentless and righteous

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Updated: August 4, 2011 4:20PM

For the better part of three decades, with time off for good behavior, David Boyle has been the conscience of Cicero.

Even as I write those words, I wonder how Dave might have reacted to them.

Unfortunately, it’s too late to ask. Dave died at home Feb. 2 from liver disease. He was 62.

In my imagination, though, Dave is having a good laugh at the concept of him as the conscience of a community, because Dave took a lot of things very, very seriously, but himself not so much.

“Yeah, a guilty conscience,” he might have quipped in response, considering how Cicero officials would cover up the papers on their desk or quickly break off phone conversations whenever he walked into town hall.

Or Dave might have just said, “Brown, is that the best you can do?” I hope so, because you always wanted to do your best for Dave Boyle, who never expected anything less of himself when in the service of others.

Boyle, for those who can’t quite place the name, was the Vietnam vet who stood up to the mob in Cicero and to the town government it had infected.

He did so fearlessly. He did so relentlessly. He did so righteously.

If some in Cicero found him self-righteous as a result, well, they didn’t understand him — or they understood all too well because they were responsible for the wrongs that Dave wanted to right.

Former Town President Betty Loren-Maltese would fall in the latter category. Boyle was her arch-nemesis long before she knew the FBI was breathing down her neck.

It was Dave who went toe-to-toe with Loren-Maltese and her crew at town meetings, and it was Dave who brought an unsuccessful residency challenge against her when it was discovered she had bought an expensive home in Las Vegas and moved her mother and daughter there.

It was Dave who later celebrated her criminal conviction by declaring to reporters: “Ding dong! The witch is dead.”

Dave wanted more than anything for Cicero to have honest government in his lifetime, and he wasn’t afraid to fight for it, even at a time it could get a guy killed.

He stepped squarely into the buzz saw of Cicero politics in 1985 by leading a referendum campaign to eliminate the town’s then-infamous 6 a.m. liquor licenses, some of which were mob joints.

As Dave told the story, he got involved because of a killing at a tavern near his home. What particularly offended him was that the body of the victim had been dumped on the sidewalk afterward to better enable the tavern to protect its liquor license, and Dave believed the police were complicit in that part of it.

Against all odds, the referendum was approved, but it was only advisory, and town officials still refused to budge. Dave fought on.

At one point in the campaign, the Boyles’ garage was burned down in an apparent firebombing. Cicero police harassed him. He was arrested on 11 occasions, but never convicted.

I asked his wife, Nadine, if there were other forms of harassment.

“Other than nameless people calling on the phone and threatening to kill us? No,” she said.

The Boyles were spending so much of their income in those days on legal fees to defend Dave that Nadine told him one day: “Dave, I think it would just be cheaper if you went to law school.”

And so he did, giving up a modest contracting business and relocating to Texas while he got his degree and started practicing — the aforementioned time off for good behavior.

The Boyles returned to Cicero in 2000, and Dave picked right up where he left off, only now he had a law degree to wield.

His interest was criminal defense, but he did a little of everything. Every Saturday he operated a free legal clinic from his home office, but I don’t think he was charging much the rest of the week, either. He developed a following in Cicero’s Hispanic immigrant community and among local tradesmen.

“His clients have been coming to me, salt-of-the-earth people,” Nadine said. “These big hulking men are crying because Dave helped them. That’s better than a lot of money in the bank.”

Against Dave’s wishes, Nadine is holding a memorial celebration at the VFW Hall in Berwyn from 11 a.m. to 2 p.m. on Feb. 19.

Cicero is a better place for Dave Boyle’s influence, but he would have been the first to tell you it has a ways to go. Now it will be up to others to make sure Cicero has a conscience.